BitCoin Drama Continues After Hours - After plunging by over 60% intraday -

BitCoin Drama Continues After Hours - After plunging by over 60% intraday - 


Think the great BitCoin drama is over? After plunging by over 60% intraday, touching $100 from an all time high of $265 earlier, BitCoin was just getting started, posting a just as epic rebound to $200 in mere hours... before tumbling once more to $125... before rebounding again to $180... before sliding to $140... and so on. As the vomit-inducing sequence above hints, merely following every twist and turn of the real time tragicomedy that is the minute chart of BTC is a full-time job. And with the bulk of assorted BTC price charts DDoSed into oblivion, or merely down due to record traffic, the only remaining real-time chart may be the following from Clark Moody: we suggest using 1 Minute resolution. Perhaps what is most fascinating, is that unlike regular stock, FX or commodity charts which are largely dominated by robots, algos and other electronic traders, the trading in BTC is purely carbon-form based. So for those who enjoy some seriously hypnotic after hours undulations, this chart's for you.

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http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-04-10/bitcoin-drama-continues-after-hours

Dinosaur embryos yield organic material in ‘mind boggling’ discovery by Canadian-led team -

Dinosaur embryos yield organic material in ‘mind boggling’ discovery by Canadian-led team - 


With the discovery of some of the oldest known fossilized dinosaur embryos, a Canadian-led research team has also found evidence of what may be preserved collagen — organic remains of an animal that lived in the early Jurassic, 190 million years ago.
Jurassic embryos do not a Jurassic Park make. For lead author Robert Reisz, a paleontologist at the University of Toronto Mississauga, the discovery is quite a bit better.
“People have focused on the great possibilities of DNA, which is much more delicate,” says Reisz. While DNA degrades quickly as bones become fossils, collagen lasts longer and has become a cutting-edge research tool for probing molecular links between species.
Preserved collagen was how another Canadian research team recently showed that a 3.5-million-year-old fossil found in the high Arctic belonged to an animal in the camel family.
The research is the cover story of this week’s issue of the prestigious journal Nature.
“This is really important fundamental baseline work that every subsequent study on dinosaur embryos is going to have to cite. That’s the most simple way of putting it,” said Royal Ontario Museum Vertebrate Paleontology Curator David Evans, who has worked with Reisz on previous dinosaur embryo research but was not involved in this study.
Timothy Huang of the National Chung Hsing University first discovered the fossil site in Yunnan province, southwest China. A chemist with a penchant for paleontology, he invited Reisz to come investigate.
After excavating one square metre of the bone bed, they uncovered 200 embryonic bones from a species called Lufengosaurus, dinosaurs from the long-necked prosauropod family.
The discovery was an exciting find for several reasons. First, the specimens are around 190 million years old, matching the age of another oldest-known set of dinosaur embryos found in South Africa. Embryonic material is a rare find to begin with, and much of what has been found dates to the Cretaceous, at least 125 million years younger than these fossils.
Secondly, the bone bed held fossils from several of different animals at various stages of embryonic development, rather than a single nest of several animals exactly the same age. That allowed Reisz’s team to show that, for example, Lufengosaurus femur bones doubled in size while still in the egg, a surprisingly quick growth rate.
But the most important discovery was of preserved complex proteins, probably collagen.
That find came almost by chance — Hwang, the chemist, wanted to test for it despite the odds. Researchers have found organic material in dinosaur fossils before, but always from large specimens like the T. Rex, says Reisz.
The discovery of preserved proteins in something as delicate and porous as an embryonic bone is “mind boggling,” says Reisz.
“I never would have even thought of looking for it.”
The next step is to try to find a way to extract the material, which would hypothetically allow researchers to extract a molecular fingerprint from it that can be matched to that of living species.
Reisz also wants to start looking for collagen in other fossils, embryonic or not.
“I suspect that if we start using this methodology elsewhere, we will find it more frequently than we think,” he says.

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http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/04/10/dinosaur_embryos_yield_organic_material_in_mind_boggling_discovery_by_canadianled_team.html

‘Amazing’ bedbug remedy stops insects in their tracks — without chemicals -

‘Amazing’ bedbug remedy stops insects in their tracks — without chemicals - 



Generations of Eastern European housewives doing battle against bedbugs spread bean leaves around the floor of an infested room at night. In the morning, the leaves would be covered with bedbugs that had somehow been trapped there. The leaves, and the pests, were collected and burned – by the pound, in extreme infestations.
Now a group of U.S. scientists is studying this bedbug-leaf interaction, with an eye to replicating nature’s Roach Motel.
A study to be published Wednesday in The Journal of the Royal Society Interface details the scientists’ quest, including their discovery of how the bugs get hooked on the leaves, how the scientists have tried to recreate these hooks synthetically and how their artificial hooks have proved to be less successful than the biological ones.

At first glance, the whole notion seems far-fetched, said Catherine Loudon, a biologist at the University of California, Irvine, who specializes in bedbug locomotion.
“If someone had suggested to me that impaling insects with little tiny hooks would be a valid form of pest control, I wouldn’t have given it credence,” she said in an interview. “You can think of lots of reasons why it wouldn’t work. That’s why it’s so amazing.”
But even though there is no indication that the bean leaves and the bedbugs evolved to work together, the leaves are fiendishly clever in exploiting the insects’ anatomy. Like the armour covering knights in medieval times, the bedbug’s exoskeleton has thinner areas where its legs flex and its tiny claws protrude – like the spot where a greave, or piece of leg armour, ends.
“The areas where they appear to be pierceable,” Loudon said, “are not the legs themselves. It’s where they bend, where it’s thin. That’s where they get pierced.”
This folk remedy from the Balkans was never entirely forgotten. A German entomologist wrote about it in 1927, a scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture mentioned it in a paper in 1943, and it can be found in Web searches about bedbugs and bean plants.
But the commercial availability of pesticides like DDT in the 1940s temporarily halted the legions of biting bugs. As their pesticide-resistant descendants began to multiply from Manhattan to Moscow, though, changing everything from leases to liability laws, the hunt for a solution was on.
The first task was to determine exactly how the hooks – the technical name is trichomes – worked. The process was viewed through an electron microscope, Loudon said.
“The foot comes down onto the surface, but as it’s lifting up, it’s catching on these hooks,” she said. “The point is pointing down. So all of their legs get impaled.”
“And as soon as one leg gets caught,” she added, “they are rapidly moving legs around and try to get away on the surface. That’s when they get multiply impaled.”

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http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/04/10/amazing_bedbug_remedy_stops_insects_in_their_tracks_without_chemicals.html